With thanks going to EVGA, I have the X299 Micro motherboard on the test bench today. This is one of the few mATX X299 motherboards available currently. According to EVGA this board will support all Core i9, even the big dog, 18 core/36 thread i9 7980XE. All I can test with currently is the Core i9 7900X so let’s dive in and see how the X299 Micro holds up. Read More

Today we have the MSI X370 SLI Plus on the test bench. This sample is one of the lowest priced motherboards equipped with the AMD X370 chipset in the retail market. Just at a glance you can see that it’s a bit stripped down from its bigger brothers but still appears to have everything you might need to get your Ryzen CPU up and going, even overclocked, and at a reasonable price. The AM4 platform is still relatively new and with that comes a few growing pains. This leaves some of the memory options a bit limited and just finding the right memory for your motherboard can be a challenge since there’s still some compatibility issues on all boards at the moment. There’s another AGESA update scheduled for May, hopefully this will open things up a bit for us enthusiasts. Read More

Today we will have a chance to look at yet another board in MSI’s seemingly already full product stack for Z170 based motherboards. The offering we have today is the MSI Z170A SLI Plus. This board, while it should game and overclock well, is pointed to a more specific market: those that use multiple GPUs. It is geared that way because of the spacing between the main PCIe slots (triple slot spacing). So one can use two of your choice cards, be it AMD or NVIDIA based, and still have some room between the cards for better cooling, particularly for the top card. Read More